Refusing Grief
This is a city.
It is not grief spilling its long shadows.
This is my apartment.
It is not a small box in the night sky
that I have mistaken for home.
This is the city lights slowly going dark.
It is not an apothecary half-stocked
with memory’s luminous jars,
and I am not swallowing their blue flames whole.
The blue flames are not the moonlight,
and I am not the moth
frying itself silly
in the roiling incandescence
of what it must remember.
This is not the woman I loved
asleep beside me, her dark hair
etched across the sheets
like aching branches,
or my friend, dead for a decade now,
returning along the black banks
as if it were as simple
as pulling the moon’s slow oars.
This is not her pulse or his
or the years beating down the doors.
It is my body dismantling
what the heart names.
It is muscle, stone, wood, rain
repeating into the dark.